Honestly, and I say that as a 98% Deck player (according to last year Steam Recap), it is starting to lack horsepower.
I really hope the Deck 2 will allow for external GPUs when docked, because E33 really did put it on his knees 😅.
Even at “optimized” settings (which you cannot change on the Deck), I was at 20-30 FPS unless I enabled XeSS. And even then it looked like shit 😅.
That depends a lot on what you’re playing and what your expectations are. I use my Ally to play older games and indies and I feel like it’s great for that. AAA experiences I play on my Xbox Series X.
I have a friend who’s had every handheld and he says they all suck, but he’s expecting to play stuff like COD at high settings and 60fps. That’s just not realistic.
But again I’m coming from growing up with gameboys and Nintendo DS so I don’t have the expectations that someone who grew up in the HD generation might have.
I’m a gameboy era dude, I don’t have that high expectations from a portable console.
To this day I managed to play to most AAA game I throwed at the Deck at an OK quality (low to medium) with good fps (40-45 fps).
But E33 just didn’t want to, and some area looked a lot different than on my 5 year old computer.
The manor, as an example, looks washed out and overexposed, almost white and grey, while on the computer it looked oldish, but acceptable. And I was on low settings on the computer 😅. So either it is currently bugged, or there is an hidden “very low” setting specially made for the Deck.
I don’t know where your preferences lie, but by the numbers, far more games are coming in under the Steam Deck specifications in terms of system requirements than there are games that are stretching them or exceeding them. Very few companies can afford to make a game that runs poorly on it. If we look at the top 12 highest-reviewing games on OpenCritic for 2025 so far, I think only 1 of them (Monster Hunter Wilds) doesn’t meet the spec, and at least 3 or 4 of them are 2D with a retro aesthetic. All that to say, I think the horsepower ought to be enough for most people for a very long time, barring a minimal number of games.
Honestly, and I say that as a 98% Deck player (according to last year Steam Recap), it is starting to lack horsepower.
I really hope the Deck 2 will allow for external GPUs when docked, because E33 really did put it on his knees 😅. Even at “optimized” settings (which you cannot change on the Deck), I was at 20-30 FPS unless I enabled XeSS. And even then it looked like shit 😅.
That depends a lot on what you’re playing and what your expectations are. I use my Ally to play older games and indies and I feel like it’s great for that. AAA experiences I play on my Xbox Series X.
I have a friend who’s had every handheld and he says they all suck, but he’s expecting to play stuff like COD at high settings and 60fps. That’s just not realistic.
But again I’m coming from growing up with gameboys and Nintendo DS so I don’t have the expectations that someone who grew up in the HD generation might have.
I’m a gameboy era dude, I don’t have that high expectations from a portable console.
To this day I managed to play to most AAA game I throwed at the Deck at an OK quality (low to medium) with good fps (40-45 fps).
But E33 just didn’t want to, and some area looked a lot different than on my 5 year old computer.
The manor, as an example, looks washed out and overexposed, almost white and grey, while on the computer it looked oldish, but acceptable. And I was on low settings on the computer 😅. So either it is currently bugged, or there is an hidden “very low” setting specially made for the Deck.
I don’t know where your preferences lie, but by the numbers, far more games are coming in under the Steam Deck specifications in terms of system requirements than there are games that are stretching them or exceeding them. Very few companies can afford to make a game that runs poorly on it. If we look at the top 12 highest-reviewing games on OpenCritic for 2025 so far, I think only 1 of them (Monster Hunter Wilds) doesn’t meet the spec, and at least 3 or 4 of them are 2D with a retro aesthetic. All that to say, I think the horsepower ought to be enough for most people for a very long time, barring a minimal number of games.
I totally agree.
As for E33… Well, I’ll probably be able to play to it on the future Deck 2, with better graphics. An enhanced edition without needing an update 😆